Did Today Really Just Happen?

So I wrote this like two months ago and forgot to post it. Deal.


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OCD Nightmare #1: Visiting My Doctor. I had an appointment to go talk to my doctor about where things stand with my mood meds. I stopped seeing my psychiatrist ages ago, because (1) he was kind of a doucher and (2) I found out miles too late that he wasn't an in-network provider (O HAI SEE YA $600), so I just thought I'd see my regular MD, since we were really only dealing with medication here, not talk-therapy. But that means I have to go sit at a regular doctor's office amongst all the sick people for a minimum of 25 minutes before I'm seen, because they're always late, and my pits get sweaty, and my blood pressure rises steeply, both from the long wait (which pisses me off immensely) and from being around ill people. So I had the pleasure of doing that today, seeing my general practitioner for a followup appointment. She was on-call today, too, so she was extra late and THEN had to take an emergent phone call halfway through our session, so I sat there, BP at a good 180/100, certain I was actively in the process of catching a cold as I sat there waiting.

OCD Nightmare #2: The Prescription. After explaining to my doctor that nothing we've tried so far has even touched my OCD (and I'm on a laundry list of meds 8 mile long), I burst into tears and confessed that I feared nothing would ever work. My doctor said, "Well, it depends on how far you're willing to go." I asked her what she meant, and she actually--this actually happened--she actually said, "There's electroshock therapy." I was like,

She said, "It sounds medieval, but for stubborn mental or psychological issues, it can really work."

Hang on. I need a glass of wine.

OK.

So I was like, "Motherfucking electroshock therapy. R u srs." She was srs. She was dead srs. I was all, "Does it...hurt?" She kind of explained how it worked and I was like, "Um...can I just have some motherfucking Buspar instead?"

She prescribed the motherfucking Buspar.

OCD Nightmare #3: We Take the Kids to Their Doctor. Both tots needed shots today: Naomi needed her second flu shot and her first pneumococcal shot (we delay and stagger vaccines, but we do vaccinate), and Maya needed Hep A #2 and Hep B #2 (we're waaaay behind on those, oops). So we had the joy of waiting around in the pediatrician's office, where I think my blood pressure was by now 200/120 from waiting so long, steam by now roiling from my ears.

And I was in panic mode, since Maya had her hands all over everything--the handles of the chairs, the table, the fish tank. And Naomi kept wanting to touch my purse, and I was like,

NOT THE PURSE!!!

We waited forever, and finally we got called in to the actual doctor's office where we could wait some more. But at least they had Purell, so we could use some of that, which lowered my BP to a fine fine 170/90, I'm sure. Finally the medical assistant came in, the kids got their shots, which they took like pros and neither one  cried, and we were done. Thank God. Then, when I was putting the baby in her carseat, I bumped her head on the roof of the car and she burst into sobs. FML.

OCD Nightmare #4: Dinner. Then, the plan was, we were going to go eat at Applebees (I know, we party like rockstars up in here), but we pulled up and (1) saw how crowded the parking lot was, (B) realized it was 5:30 on a weekend night, and (iii) my anxiety inexplicably and immediately went through the roof, so instead we went next door and got some food poisoning Subway instead. Much better.

We go home and eat our food poisoning Subway and try to get Maya to eat some soup, but she is basically doing this at the dinner table:

I can only assume it's from the vaccines. She's doing weird shit like dipping her fingers in her soup and zoning out, which isn't normal for her. So after trying to get her to eat for an hour, we give up. We're calling it bedtime, 2-1/2 hours ahead of schedule.

OCD Nightmare #5: Poop. On a Hot Tin Butt. So, if you recall, Maya suffers terribly from constipation. It's truly terrible--it's gotten so much worse, and she holds in her poop so long that when she does go, it's truly like beholding the site of an assacre. Blood, shit, bloody shit, the whole nine.

So all day long we've been trying to get her to poop, since she hasn't in days. She's been farting like King Fart of Shit Mountain. She's been bent over, knock-kneed, waddling, hand between her buttcheeks, yet claiming she doesn't have to poop. We've been sitting her on the chamberpot every 30 minutes, telling her to JUST FUCKING POOP. It's like potty training all over again. But still she insisted she didn't have to go.

So then about 20 minutes following our fine fine Subway dinner and her two-sips-of-soup supper, she's waddling around again, knees together, butt sticking out, and if I know anything I know there's a duke in there the size of Manhattan. I take her to the potty and lo and befuckinghold, her draws are full of shit. Liquishit. She has sharted at least a half-pint into her favorite green unniepannies, and it has soaked through them onto the pajamas I had put her in. FML SO HARD.

She is hysterical. I am trying not to be, but come on, SHIT IN PANTS. I peel off her jammies and throw her underwear into the garbage. I did not think she could get more hysterical than she already was. I did not think there was a pitch higher than her voice had already reached. I was wrong. When I threw away her underwear, she went ballistic.

"BUT MOM! THOSE ARE MY NEW UNNIEPANNIES!!"

"No, those are your old ones."

"NO THEY ARE MY BRAND-NEW ONES! MOM!!!"

"No, they're your old ones, and they're getting too small anyway."

"THEY'RE NEW AND I WANT THEM! DON'T THROW THEM AWAY! DON'T THROW THEM AWAY!!!"

"The new ones I just bought you are purple and aqua, remember? These are green. These are old. These are too small. And anyway, you shat them. They cannot be saved. They are sullied beyond repair. No one can help these unniepannies now."

"MOM!! MOM! MOYYY-OMMMMM! PLEASE! PLEEEEASE! DON'T THROW THEM AWAY! MOM! PLEASE! NOOOOO!!"

"Maya. I am throwing these underwears out. They have been pooped in and I will not wash them. Not today, not tomorrow, not in this lifetime. You better be glad I am not throwing out the pajamas too, but luckily I grew up broke as a joke in a single-parent family and it had a negative effect on my hoarding tendencies and can't bring myself to toss out a perfectly good jammy. But these underwears are goners."

"BUT MOY-OMMM!! I WANT THEM! PUH LEEEEASE!!! DON'T THROW AWAAY MY UNNIEEPANNNIEEEWSSASSADLKFJSSFJSKDASHJFS:A:JASA;SLKFLL;SKFLSA;!!@@#215%&!"

Ad infinitum. Here she is shrieking, positively shrieking, so loud that I am certain the neighbors knew she had sharted her draws.

The OCD in me wants to just put her outside. Just, you know, just put my child outside, forever. Just not deal with it. Just put her in the garbage with the soiled unniepannies. Just not even deal. Because my kid has shit on her buns. Shit. On her buns.

But I have to deal. So I wipe her down. And if she wasn't falling asleep at the wheel, a full shower would have been in order, but we'll just do that tofuckingmorrow. Today was full of enough shit.

At least there was no semi-automatic ass-spray this time.

This Is Not My Beautiful House

OCD is funny sometimes. Well, I mean, no, not funny, not fun. But odd. You might think that because I'm a germ nut that everything about my life is sterile and spotless and perfectly orderly. You might expect to walk into my home and find sparkling, pine-fresh perfection. But my house is far from perfect.

First of all, it's too damn small for the four of us, so it's cluttered. Stuff everywhere, on every ledge, on every shelf, on every countertop, in every storage bin, in baskets. Stuff. Stuffy stuff. Everywhere. And it really does bother me (sometimes to the point of a near panic attack), but apparently not enough to be arsed to actually do a massive overhaul and throw shit out.

Plus, part of my OCD is that I show small signs of h...h..hoarding (YIKES)--I have an extremely hard time letting go of things even when they are of no use to me. It's not like I hoard newspapers, or Taco Bell wrappers, or cigarette butts--but trinkets and things that "just sit there," I can't get rid of. And my reasoning is because someone gave it to me. Someone cared enough to think of me, and someone spent money on it. (And if you remember, we was broke as a joke growing up, so I've never been one to waste my money, or someone else's money.) So how could I throw away, donate, or even re-sell something that someone gave me? Therefore, I have a massive amount of stuff around the house that Just Sits There. And yes, it drives me apeshit--however, I may have OCD but I'm also a lazy fuck.

Where was I. So yes, the house is cluttered. With things we need, with things we don't, with trinkets and nonsense and bullshit, and most of all with baby things. Toys toys toys. Everywhere.

Our house also gets pretty dusty, and if you look closely you might find that crap in the very corners/crevices of things that is so hard to clean out. There are always clothes on the bedroom floor. My older daughter's room can be a disaster. Our kitchen table is covered in arts and crafts and papers and pens and stray marks and spilled glitter glue. Our shower gets mildew or soap scum sometimes (but I do love me some bleach spray, and I use it liberally). My husband is middling-to-terrible about remembering to take the garbage out. Etc. I'll clean it up for guests, but like I said, if you look closely...definitely not spotless.

So OCD doesn't mean I live in a Stepford Home. Not to mention, believe it or not, there are Things I WILL Do. I will manually coax a hard poop from a constipated baby's butt. I mean fuck, I will coax a poop from a constipated dog!! We used to have a Greyhound who would get terribly constipated, and she would strain and strain, and I learned a trick: You everso delicately insert a matchstick, sulfur-end first, into their bum-bum (juuuust barely). And they will shit within seconds. I kid you not. Google it. But I did this, all for the love of the dog. I will do many things. I will clean toilets without complaint. I will let a cow lick my hand with its horrible, wonderful, slobbery slimy rough scratchy flabby tongue. I will kiss my dog on her head. I will kiss my baby's completely drool-covered mouth. I will let my cousin's tiny chihuahua lick Maya's cheek. I will chase down frogs in our yard and hold them. I even owned one as a pet ten years back, and I loved him so hard.

The frog I owned and held regularly: 

The frog I chased down just yesterday evening (after discovering him on our hot tub) and held:

I will even clean up three and a half, six, or fifteen feet (yes fifteen feet, it truly happened) of cat puke when necessary, and laugh about it, because if I hadn't laughed, I would have cried. 

Alas, I do not have photographic evidence of the fifteen feet of puke, but here is the three and a half. And I cleaned it up whilst wearing a very fancy red party dress after a Christmas party:

So, there ARE things I WILL DO. It's just that I, OMFG, wash my hands afterward. Imagine the hell out of that. (Well, truth be told I washed my hands four times after catching the wild frog yesterday, and applied hand sani twice. Bygones.) But see, I don't live I a complete bubble, and neither do my kids.

And our house is nowhere near pristine. It's kind of like, in my brain, it's not our germs I mind. I mean, we still always wash when appropriate when we're home, and let me assure you, the countertops (though cluttered) are Cloroxed whiter than Donnie & Marie's veneers, and everything you touch is as clean as a clean whistle what has been bleached, but it's like, as long as the germs of the world are sent to their foamy soapy grave down the drain the very second we enter our house, then I kind of let go a little, and hey, our germs are our germs and how can I get rid of every last one?

I some ways my OCD has gotten far, far worse, and the things I do to avoid germs/clean germs are much more extreme than they were, say ten years ago. But if you remember, ten years ago, I would Fantastik every inch of my apartment every single day, even though it was only I who lived there. So I don't know, I guess I'm more lax on vacuuming and scrubbing out every crevice of my own home, but much, much more freaky about other people's germs.

Still, even at home, I do find myself very anxious when it comes to so many things ("Did you wash after you changed her diaper? Maya, did you wash after you used your potty chair? Hey, I saw you wipe your nose with your hand so go wash. Did Naomi's binky fall down? Go wash it! Did you use hand sani? Maya! Sneeze into your ELBOW!" etc.). I am still constantly on yellow alert while at home, especially regarding what others are doing, but it's a different kind of anxiety than being out somewhere like a restaurant or the grocery store or certain people's houses. After taking as many measures as are practical, I can kind of be OK with our own germs.

That's the idea behind washing when we get home--erase the sins of the world and start fresh. For example, who cares if Naomi spits up all the hell over me? I can live with baby puke about my person.

(And so, clearly, can my poor sweet husband:)

Or who cares if I lay her right on the carpet, nakeypie, and she piddles on it?

(Here I am in the process of mopping and Anti-Icky-Poo-ing it up, and Naomi is in the process of inviting you to the Gun Show:)

Our germs. OURS.

It's not like I'm a Howard Hughes though. It's not like in public I'm a germ FREAK and then at home I collect bottles of my own piss or something.

For reference:

"Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, so that he could insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of it." Yet...

"In December 1947, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, to respond when spoken to, but otherwise not speak to him. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks." [Later,] "Hughes only had his hair cut and nails trimmed once a year."

In other words, just because I am a germaphobe in public and much less so one at home (or, I should say, just as much of a germaphobe but notably less anxious), I don't think there's any danger of me ending up sitting naked in my bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over my genitals, watching movies for a year straight.

Or maybe I will. Maybe the next logical step with my disorder is where I jump from alcoholing-down my forearms after visiting a restaurant, to sitting nude in my attic, surviving on Lik-M-Aid and scotch, and collecting my spit in vials and urinating into empty wine bottles.

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Anyway, So yeah. OCD is funny like that. You think that a germaphobe is a germaphobe in every aspect of her life, but it's not true. God how I wish for a sparse, gorgeous, immaculate home. I want people to walk in and remark with awe, "Oooh, it's a sparkly!"

And I'm never OK with the dust or the clutter, and it honestly has driven me to panic before where I am sobbing in my husband's arms, feeling so incredibly overwhelmed, but it doesn't rule my life. It doesn't invade my every thought. I don't (usually) obsess about things like dusty wedding pictures (or if I do, recall that I'm a lazy fuck), but if you come to my house and don't wash your damn dirty hands, and then you so much as touch my TV remote, I will play nice but then I will be spraying that fucker down with 25 seconds' worth of Lysol the moment you leave.

Things I Do.

Lest you think this blog is all fun, games, jokes, and bum-bums, let me assure you, it is not. In the famous words of one Mr. Billy Crystal:

It's not funny being a mom with OCD. It's not fun being a mom with OCD. It really, really sucks.

I just wanted to give you a quick rundown of the Things I Do. A non-exhaustive list. These are my obsessions. These are my compulsions. This is my disorder.

• I wash all my fruits and vegetables. Oh really? you say, nonplussed. Doesn't everybody? Well first of all, let me tell you that no, not everybody does. *shudder* When I met my husband, he did not wash his produce. He ate store-bought grapes straight from the bag, without so much as a splash of water. Let it be known, I put an end to that with a right quickness. But back to my point: I wash all fruits and vegetables......WITH SOAP. Now, some of you may have done this once or twice with a certain fruit, like cantaloupes. A few years back, there was a big e.coli outbreak, traced back to cantaloupes. Why? Because cantaloupes sit around in shit manure-enriched dirt all day long. News stations started recommending washing your melons with soap (that's what she said?). And suddenly, people started thinking, "Hey, maybe I too should wash my fucking cantaloupe before slicing e.coli straight through its delicious orange flesh!" Even wikipedia agrees with me:

"Because the surface of a cantaloupe can contain harmful bacteria—in particular, Salmonella—it is always a good idea to wash a melon thoroughly before cutting and consumption."

God bless you, wikipedia. But I digest. So anyway, some of you might wash a honeydew or two with soap, but let me assure you, I wash all my produce with soap. A tiny dab of dishsoap. That includes apples (naturally--I mean, just think how many hands have picked them over, looking for that perfect Braeburn; fingers that have picked asses, hands that have flushed toilets, hands that have been sneezed all over, hands that have been on the naughty bits, fingers that have been up noses...). I also wash, with soap, oranges (if you cut them or gouge your fingers into them to peel them, IN go the germs), tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, avocados (again--slicing the salmonella straight through), everything. Even...bananas. Because, who wants to touch a dirty banana (that's what she said?) that has been handled by hundreds of people from one country to the next? I just don't want to handle a dirty banana and then go wipe drool from my precious newborn's mouth, is all. I want clean bananas. So sue me.

People always chastise me, "But then your fruit will taste like soap!" Umm, ever heard of this thing called rinsing? If you wash your plates and forks and spoons with dishsoap, does all your food taste like soap? No. Because you, umm, rinsed them?

So yes. That is Thing 1 that I do. Here is Thing 2.

• I wash my hands the very second I enter my home (after, naturally, taking off my shoes). The whole family does. The first thing we do, no matter how full the bladder, no matter how hungry the husband, no matter how urgently something else needs to be done, is wash our hands. For a fresh start. To keep the germs of the world out of my sanctuary, my home. And upon arriving home, after washing, we also use hand sanitizer. Yes, we wash and THEN we use hand sanitizer too. If my husband is taking care of washing Maya's hands in the guest bathroom and I am washing up in the kitchen, you will often hear me anxiously scream out, "DID YOU USE HAND SANI AFTER??" And the answer is always yes. Because my husband has been well-trained is no fool. But still, I ask, because I can't not. One could even say I ask...compulsively. HUH!
  
  
• If I pass somebody who has the nerve to cough, or, God in heaven forbid, sneeze, as I pass by, I instantly hold my breath and lower my head and look down. I hold my breath (mid-breath, at whatever stage of breathing I was in) in order to not inhale their ferocious and surely deadly maladies, and I look downward so that minuscule droplets and effluvia do not enter my eyeballs. That's right. Because eyes are a mucous membrane, and you are more likely to catch a cold if you touch your eyes (with cold-germy hands) than your mouth. And in my mind, I can see those cough germs propelled at me, and I die a little inside, say a few prayers, hold my breath, look down, and hurry past as fast as I can. 

OK, last point for now, because there are so many Things I Do that they will require a separate entry. And trust me. Some of them get goooood (and by good I mean crazaaaay). And some of the Things I Do are so good that I will in fact never, not ever share them with you, because that are JUST THAT loony toons. They are THAT crazy. Well, the tricky thing is, they are crazy to you. Not to me. To me, just embarrassing. And to me, they are right and good and important. To me, they are absolutely necessary. To me, they protect my family's health and save my sanity. But some Things I Do are even too outlandish to share. Maybe someday... 

Anyway, one last Thing I Do:

• I will not let my children play at the McPlayPlace. Will not. More accurately, cannot. I wish I could, because PlayPlaces are fun Places to Play. And Maya wants to go. I wish I could take her. But I am held hostage by my phobias. To me, the McDonalds PlayPlace is a hotbed of germs. Why do I feel that way? Because it is. And you've got to admit that. But see, even though that place is positively crawling with every disease and virus known to mankind, most moms can still let their kids play there. Because kids like to play, and moms like milkshakes. And most moms don't think, "If I let my child so much as crawl through one McTunnel, she will come down with swine flu." Well I do. And I cannot help it, and I cannot stop it. There was one time--ONE TIME--a couple of years ago that I took Maya to the PlayPlace. I don't know how I managed, but I did. (I had woken up on the softer side of OCD that day.) And every so often while she played, I had her come over and use hand sanitizer, then keep playing. There may or may not have been a few dozen shrieks of "Maya! HANDS OUT! DON'T TOUCH YOUR MOUTH!!" throughout the very tense morning. When she was all done, I wiped her hands with sanitizing wipes, then used hand sanitizing gel, then went home and washed thoroughly, THEN used hand sani again. I know, you're thinking, "This bish gonna give her kid skraight-up alcohol poisoning." Or else by now you are just dying, DYING inside to start spouting off "facts" about the Hygiene Hypothesis. SEE ENTRY #1, MOTHERFUCKER.

But my point is, I let her. One time. And guess what happened? She. Got. Sick. She caught a cold. The dreaded cold.* Coincidence? Correlation, causation, whatnot, whathaveyou? All I know is that the one time I took my gee-dee kid to McPlay around a little, she got sick. And honest to God, this is a kid that just doesn't get sick. She's had like two colds in her life. Thus, coincidence, I think not. So never again. You can just forget that particular indoor germ incubator.  The McDonalds PlayPlace can kiss my bum-bum.

You can also forget bouncy houses, Chuck E. Cheese's, Funtasia, coffee shop play areas, mall play areas (*herk*), and the play area at doctors' offices (the absolute worst of the worst). Taking my daughter to outdoor parks is hard (and rare) enough, but on a broiling hot day when the sun's intense rays are there to act as God's Disinfectant, if you catch me in a rare moment of lowered anxiety, I might take my kid to slide a little at the joint down the street (but these days I am vigilant about checking for fossilized poop on said slide). So we play a little, I hyperventilate a little, I scream out a little too often "Maya HANDS OUT!!!", and we head home. Followed by a bleach bath and a quick dousing in flames. I kid.

*This dread, this extreme and absolute fear of colds and flus, that is a story for another day. Sit tight and try to be patient, child.

I wish I could take my child places. I do. I joke, but seriously: the panic. The anxiety. You cannot imagine the fear. So, stuck in the house day after day, I suffer. And worse, my kids suffer. 

And this is the part that's not funny, that's not fun.

:(